Introduction

Content marketing is not easy, it takes a lot of elbow grease to create valuable content and even more to promote it!

The promotion part is something that many companies tend to miss when looking at a content marketing strategy. A general rule of thumb is you should spend 30% of your time creating content and 70% promoting it. That’s why I created this checklist you can use to promote the content you work so hard to create.

I’m writing this checklist for two purposes. Firstly, because I am interested in content promotion for my own company Process Street. Content marketing is something I’ve been experimenting with and seeing some great results with so far, writing this post is forcing me to research and learn more about content distribution. Secondly, because I want to make a template for this in Process Street so I can begin hand it off to my team. I am working towards a streamlined content marketing machine.

Eventually I want to have a ghostwriter, a blogger a designer and a team of promoters. I will still be creating the core content, but I won’t have to polish or distribute any of it. I’m confident this checklist will help my business, and I hope it’s useful for yours too.

Note, if you’re launching a website, check out our Website Launch Checklist. There is a little overlap but its targeted to a new website launch vs a piece of content on an existing site.

Preparation:

Set up blog

Before you get started creating, publishing and promoting content on your blog, you first need to have a blog. So, the first step in this checklist is to set up (or verify) your company blog! Record the link to the blog in the form field below.

Company Blog

If you already have your blog set up, record the link and move on. If not, watch the below video to see how you can setup your company blog in under 5 minutes.

Prepare your post

The next step is to prepare a summary of your content. Use the form fields below to record each section of the post summary for easy re-use across platforms.

Post Headline

Post Description

Post Publish Date

Post Excerpt

Post URL

Shortened URL

Post Headline

Remember to prepare a variety of headlines (5-10); keep the best for yourself then use the rest for posting on social media, content syndication and content repurposing (ie naming a slide show or pdf etc).

Brief Description

Write a few of these, one to three sentences long. These are needed when submitting to many sites

Once you’ve prepared your post, it's time to start promoting! Keep going with the content promotion checklist to generate a huge wave of traffic to every piece of content you create.

Don’t forget you can get this as an interactive checklist inside Process Street, allowing you to track the promotion of multiple pieces of content, customize and hand off to your team. Start a free 30 day trial of Process Street to see it in action.

Content Promotion Checklist:

Share on social media

This one is fairly obvious; share the post across your social media channels. You can significantly speed up this process using a social media management tool. Record your progress with the sub-checklist below.

1

Facebook Profile (Status Update)

2

Facebook Page (Post)

3

Twitter – 3-5 post over a week, use #hastags

4

Google+ – Personal and Company profile

5

LinkedIn Status Update

6

Pinterest – Pin all images (all epic content has images)

7

Instagram – Post 1-2 images from the post

8

Ask team members to share

9

Ask friends and family members to share

Learn Social Media Basics

Not sure how or what this social media thing is? Check out the below video for a great introduction into the basics of Social Media.

Email your subscribers

Another pretty straightforward task now - you need to email your subscribers!. You should be collecting leads on your website and you should be promoting your content to those leads.

For example, you can use Mailchimp set up on an auto RSS feed to automatically email new blog posts out. Most email service providers such Aweber and Getresponse have this option too.

Here is one of the email templates we use for Mailchimp; you can use it and modify it if you are a Mailchimp user.

Perform outreach

Outreach means manually emailing, tweeting and even calling people to tell them about your content. Yes, yes, this sounds like hard work and truthfully it is, but sometimes you have to do things that don’t scale to get the ball rolling.

Use the form field below to record the list of bloggers which you will be targeting.

Target Bloggers

Outreach is arguably the most important thing for a new blogger. Check out how Alex Turnbull got over 1,000 subscribers to his blog from one post thanks to blogger outreach!

To start with outreach, you first need to create a list of bloggers you want to target. There are a few considerations here. First, they should be relevant to your niche. Don’t contact bloggers who blog in a completely different area to you. Secondly, as always, your content must be awesome!

Another tip here is to look for “up and comer” bloggers as they may be easier to contact and get less requests than really popular bloggers.

Submit to social bookmarking sites & directories

Now you need to submit your content to social bookmarking sites and directories. Use the form field below to keep track of which sites you have submitted your content to.

Targeted Sites & Directories

Social Bookmarking sites can generate a huge spike of traffic; landing the front page of a large Subreddit can yield thousands of visitors. But lots of them can generate a few hundred visitors here or there. If you get a few up votes on a rage of the sites below you can easily generate over 1000 visitors to your posts, great for initial shares to your page.

There are a number of other general social bookmarking sites, some of them get some decent traffic, all of them are good for backlink juice. To automate your social bookmarking submissions, use OnlyWire.

Onlywire will submit to 30+ social bookmarking sites at once, you can even set it up to pull your RSS feed from the blog so you don’t have to post at all.

Plus you can pay someone on Fiverr to set it all up for just $5, an effective, cheap and automated way to do social bookmarking submissions.

Submit for syndication

Next up in the content promotion checklist is submitting your content for syndication. Remember to record the sites you submit your content to with the form field below; that way you'll never lose track of where your content is already uploaded!

Content syndication can be a great way to get some solid spikes in traffic. You will need to pick your best content and pitch sites on republishing your posts. But, there are drawbacks…

You would think that Google would rank the original blog post before any syndicated versions. In a lot of cases, however, that doesn’t happen. The thinking behind this is that Google ranks the site where people prefer to read the post. So, there is potential that you could lose out on some search engine traffic.

If your blog is new then you may want to hold off using syndication until your blog is more established.

Self Syndication

There are a few publishing platforms popping up that allow you to “Self Syndicate” your posts onto a different platform. The biggest platforms at the moment are Medium and LinkedIn and Examiner. These platforms are more like blogging except your blog posts can gain additional distribution through the respective network of the site.

Use JustReTweet

Remember to use JustReTweet for some free promotion! Record the status of the post with the form field below.

JustReTweet Status

JustReTweet is a kind of Twitter exchange, where you can earn credit re-tweeting other peoples' posts and use that credit for others to retweet your posts. This is a great way to get some early re-tweets and social proof for your post.

This is a very easy task to outsource to a VA as part of their daily tasks to earn you credit.

Check out the below video to see how JustRetweet works:

Post on related forums and groups

Next up in the content promotion checklist is to post on related forums and groups. As always, record the forums and groups you've submitted to with the trusty form fields below.

Submitted Forums

Submitted Groups

Forums

Finding forums in your niche and contribute to them can be a great way to drive traffic, just be careful not to spam!

Respond to threads that ask questions about the topic of your post with a short summary and a link back, you can also post new threads in relevant sections of the forum. Posting your content in forums is generally fine as long as it’s relevant and useful. If they think you are spamming you will probably be banned so tread with caution. But there are plenty of people who generate thousands of visits a month from forum marketing so it’s definitely worth testing.

Some forums also allow you to link to your website in your signature. These forums are great as every one of your responses will have a short pitch and a link to your site.

Comment on related blog posts

Now you should (at least consider) commenting on related blog posts. Record the URLs of any blog posts you comment on in the form field below.

Commented Posts

Posting on relevant high-traffic blogs can bring in a bit of traffic; it won’t be anything monstrous, but it can bring a steady stream of a few thousand visits a month if done well.

If you want to really generate traffic from blog commenting, you will need to be the first commenter. To do that you can use a tool like Mention to watch for new posts in your on high traffic blogs, then quickly jump on to reply.

I don’t do this at the moment. Generally what I do is after I publish a post, I search 2-5 variations of my post title. For example, on my post “Why I Moved from Dropbox to Google Drive” I did a search for “Dropbox vs Google Drive”, “Google Drive Review” and “Dropbox Review”.

I then searched just the first and second page of Google for articles that allowed comments, posted a quick response to the article and included my link. Don’t bother going past the second page of search results, as 90% of people don’t visit the second page of Google. Sometimes your comment won’t get approved, but if your content is EPIC and RELEVANT you should get approved no problems.

If you don’t feel comfortable posting the URL to your post in the comment, most comment systems allow you to include a link to your website that will be attached to your user name. Here you can include a link to your content, although it will probably get a lower click through rate.

Post on Q&A sites

Search major Q&A sites for posts related to your content and post responses in the answers when appropriate. Record links to the questions you answer with the form field below.

Questions Answered

If you aren't already familiar with the top Q&A sites, see below for our pick of the crop.

Use Scoop.it

The next step in promoting your content is to assign your post to the relevant lists in Scoop.it. As always, use the form field below to record which lists you submit your content to.

Scoop.it Lists

Scoop.it is a service that allows people to curate their own private lists of content from around the web. Other people can then follow these lists and read the suggestions of their owners. Scoop.it has many big lists in every niche.

To promote your content on Scoop.it, you will want to submit it to the top 25-50 lists in your niche. If the owner approves the article it will be published for all the followers to see and can generate a flood of traffic. Remember, your content needs to be epic and relevant to be approved for sites like this.

Select Topic

Find Popular Lists

Suggest Content

Reverse engineer your competition

Part of the content promotion checklist is not only about boosting your post - it's about combating the competition for the top search spot. Now you need to reverse engineer your competition and record all relevant information using the form fields below.

Competitor

Top Backlinks

Top Sharers

Do a search on Topsy or Google and find where your competition is getting their backlinks for their most popular posts. Their top backlinks are also likely generating the most amount of traffic to their page.

To find the backlinks, use a tool such as Open Site Explorer or SEO Spy Glass. Look for backlinks from other blogs and social bookmarking sites. Then submit your content to the same sources, either via a submission link or by reaching out to the blogger/author as we talked about in the blogger outreach section above.

You can also reverse engineer who shared your competitor’s blog posts. Use a tool like Topsy to do a search on popular posts by your competitors and see who shared them, chances are they will share similar content. Contact them using the outreach strategies below to have them share your content

Pay for promotion

If you are aggressively working to build a blog and audience, you should consider paying to promote your content. Remember to not blindly shove money at the most available source; do you research, spend slowly and record all relevant info with the form fields below.

Warning!

Before promoting on any of the above channels you should do significant research as to which ones are the best fit for your audience and how the mechanics of each network work.

The links above do not take you directly to the advertising pages; they take you to guides to learn how to advertise on these platforms. Start with one, start slow, track your results, watch your spend! But most importantly, learn (or pay someone who has already learned).

Deep-link to the content from older posts

If you’ve been blogging for a while you probably have a few older posts that get consistent traffic. Go back and try to find the most relevant/high traffic posts and work in a link to your new piece of content.

As always, remember to record the posts you link inside with the form field below.

Old Posts Linked

Google likes this and it generates more traffic.

You can also find related post plugins on WordPress and most other blogging platforms. These are great for interlinking between posts on your site and driving traffic from your old content to your new stuff.

Repurpose your content

Repurposing your content can be one of the most powerful ways to increase the number of views your content is getting. Whilst keeping the medium relevant to the content you are repurposing, aim to get as many different avenues out of a single piece of content as possible - maximum reward for relatively little extra input!

Record the avenues you utilize with the sub-checklist and form fields below.

1

Slide Deck

2

Video

3

Podcast

4

PDF

5

Infographic

Slide Deck URLs

Video URLs

Podcast URLs

PDF URLs

Infographic URLs

This is something I am working on myself and working hard to systemize and make as streamlined as possible. I might do a guide on it in the future, but basically I want to be able to turn a blog post quickly into a video, then have my team edit it and distribute it across all the below sources.

Turn into Slide Deck

The first step is to break down your post into a slide deck. This is generally pretty easy, have a different slide for each subheading or list point, however your post is structured. Add in your images and related links. A good ideas is to create a branded template that you can just plugin all of your posts to make this process smoother.

Once you have made your slide presentation, submit it to the below sites:

You can then take your slide deck, and use it to record a video. Draft up a script, then voice over it while reading your slides. You will want to make sure you have a good microphone before doing this as quality audio can make all the difference. Here is a link to the one I use.

If you don’t want to record the video yourself, you can write up a script and have someone from Elance read it for you.

There are a few sites out there that you can use to turn your posts into infographics, then submit to infographic directories. This can be a little more work but well worth it if you have already spent lots of time researching and writing the content.